Multiple fatalities reported at Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon

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Is there any confirmation of the shooting Christians thing? If theres anything the right wing loves more than Reagan, its Christian persecution story.
 
ahoyle77 said:
Is there any confirmation of the shooting Christians thing? If theres anything the right wing loves more than Reagan, its Christian persecution story.
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I don't think there's a firm story of what the sequence of events were during the shooting. Heck, people are still wondering about that 4chan post. It'll take a while before the entire picture becomes clear.

Witnesses have said he was going around asking victims what religion they were. Some nutso idiot radical atheist with some sort of agenda, maybe.
 
It's all just copy cats now. Everyone that has these issues wants to end it the same way.

They shouldn't have showed the killer's pictures but I guess it's almost fucking impossible not to.
 
META said:
I don't think there's a firm story of what the sequence of events were during the shooting. Heck, people are still wondering about that 4chan post. It'll take a while before the entire picture becomes clear.

Witnesses have said he was going around asking victims what religion they were. Some nutso idiot radical atheist with some sort of agenda, maybe.
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The guy also seemed to have an IRA thing going on too:

Mr. Mercer appeared to have sought community on the Internet. A picture of him holding a rifle appeared on a MySpace page with a post expressing a deep interest in the Irish Republican Army. It included footage from the conflict in Northern Ireland set to “The Men Behind the Wire,” an Irish republican song, and several pictures of gunmen in black balaclavas. Another picture showed the front page of An Phoblacht, the party newspaper of Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the I.R.A.
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Chris Harper Mercer, Oregon Gunman, Is Recalled as a Recluse Close to His Mother
 
I am sorry to everyone in this country that we continue to die at each others hands and refuse to collectively take any action to stop it :(
 
From MSN:
"Oregon shooter said to have singled out Christians for killing in ‘horrific act of cowardice"

ROSEBURG, Ore. — Investigators including cyber-experts and hate crime specialists peered Friday into the life of a 26-year-old gunman whose massacre across an Oregon campus may have been driven by religious rage and a fascination with the twisted notoriety of high-profile killers.


What is known so far about the attacker — identified by a U.S. law enforcement official as Chris Harper Mercer — appear only as loose strands that suggested an interest in firearms and the infamy gained by mass shooters.

Witnesses also said he seemed to seek specific revenge against Christians, and police examined Web posts that hinted of wider antipathy toward organized faith.

But authorities still struggled to build a clearer picture at what drove the California-raised Mercer to stalk rural Umpqua Community College — armed with three pistols and a semiautomatic rifle — and methodically pick off students and professors Thursday on the fourth day of the fall semester.

At the end, nine people were dead, plus Mercer, and the college joined the mournful roster of America’s mass shooting sites.


At least 10 people were killed and seven others were wounded after a 26-year-old gunman, identified as Chris Harper Mercer, opened fire inside Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, U.S., on Oct. 1, 2015. He was shot dead following a gunfire with the police.

At least 10 others were admitted for treatment at the Mercy Medical Center, said the chief medical officer, Jason Gray, on Friday. Three patients were transferred to larger facilities for more intensive care, he added.


“The days and weeks ahead will be the most challenging” as the small community copes with the aftermath, Gray said.

The names of those killed and wounded were not yet released nor would Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin name the shooter publicly, more out of rage than discretion. “I will not name the shooter,” he said at a news conference Thursday night. “I will not give him credit for this horrific act of cowardice. Media will get the name confirmed in time … but you will never hear us use it.”

The transition from the anonymity of “before” to the notoriety of “after” took just about 10 terrifying minutes, during which the shooter strode through a school building armed with three pistols and a semiautomatic rifle. Clad in a dark shirt and jeans, driven by a motive that is still unknown, he methodically sprayed bullets into classrooms full of students, who hid behind desks and desperately tried to block doors that didn’t lock.

[Shooter left behind online portrait of a lonely youth with a grudge]

In one classroom, he appeared to single out Christian students for killing, according to witness Anastasia Boylan.

“He said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,'” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying his daughter’s account while she underwent surgery to treat a gunshot to her spine.

“And then he shot and killed them.”

Another account came from Autumn Vicari, who described to NBC News what her brother J.J. witnessed in the room where the shootings occurred. According to NBC: “Vicari said at one point the shooter told people to stand up before asking whether they were Christian or not. Vicari’s brother told her that anyone who responded ‘yes’ was shot in the head. If they said ‘other’ or didn’t answer, they were shot elsewhere in the body, usually the leg.”

The violence stopped only after authorities exchanged gunfire with Mercer. At 10:47 a.m. local time Thursday, the end was announced over the police scanner: The suspect was down.

The scraps of information about Mercer uncovered so far did not fit together easily and much remained unconfirmed, including reports that he had forecast some act of violence in Oregon in a dark corner of the Internet known as 4chan, a report being investigated by federal authorities, according to the New York Times. But a murky portrait was emerging of a quiet and withdrawn young man who struggled to connect with other people, instead seeking attention online, and who harbored anger against organized religion.

Thursday’s rampage was the latest in a series of mass shootings that have produced national revulsion, even as they have left Republicans and Democrats divided over whether such violence should lead to stricter gun laws. The campus shootings came three months after nine people were gunned down at a historic African American church in Charleston, S.C.

One group that tracks gun violence, the Mass Shooting Tracker, said it was the 294th death or injury from a shooting involving four or more people in the United States this year — a rate of more than one victim a day.

School shootings have figured prominently in this series of tragedies, including the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and the deaths of 20 children in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

From Washington, a visibly frustrated President Obama offered prayers for the victims and their families and quickly pivoted to repeat his call for stricter gun-safety laws, something he has done throughout his presidency to no avail.

“Each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. It does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America.”

But in Douglas County, a rural region where hunting is popular and crime rates are low, support for gun rights is strong.

“I carry to protect myself — the exact same reason this happened,” Casey Runyan, a disabled Marine Corps veteran who now lives in the area, told the Associated Press. He told the AP he brings a Glock-29 pistol wherever he goes.

Hanlin, the Douglas County sheriff, sent a letter to Vice President Biden in 2013, after the shootings in Newtown renewed the debate about gun control. Hanlin said that proposed restrictions would be “irresponsible and an indisputable insult to the American people,” and he and his deputies would refuse to enforce them.

For Thursday night, at least, attention was mainly on the victims. In a ritual that has repeated itself so many times over the past few years, people gathered at the Douglas County Fairgrounds where evacuees from the school had been taken to meet their families. With darkness falling, the site of reunions became a base for an anxious vigil. A chaplain led a group prayer. Families missing a member clung to one another. Friends stood by and struggled to stave off dread.

“It’s agonizing to be here and just wait,” said Sarah Cobb, 17, a UCC student who had survived the shooting by ducking under her desk but was still waiting to hear about some of her classmates and friends.

“The longer people sit in there, the more they know it is going to be bad,” she said, referring to a gathering of investigators and FBI agents in a small building at the fairgrounds. “But you’re just praying and hoping that it’s not.”

All day Thursday, local and federal law enforcement officials swarmed Umpqua’s small campus, a modest collection of about a dozen buildings largely unprotected by gates or walls.

Umpqua, one of 17 community colleges in Oregon, has about 2,000 students and about 200 full- and part-time faculty members. Federal data suggests Umpqua is a quiet campus; the only crimes reported there in recent years have been an occasional burglary and, in 2013, an aggravated assault.

After a 2006 incident in which one student was shot by another at Roseburg High School, local institutions — including UCC — hired security guards, according to the Eugene Register-Guard. Those security guards are unarmed, interim college President Rita Calvin told the newspaper. The campus is a gun-free zone.

Investigators also fanned out across two states where Mercer lived, questioning family members and former neighbors, sifting through social media postings and obscure Internet forums in search of some clues about what happened, and why.

Public records showed no previous brushes with law enforcement by Mercer. Social media accounts attributed to him, including a MySpace page and an online dating profile, offer hints of his interests — the Irish Republican Army, punk rock music, an antipathy toward religion — but little real insight.

According to reports, authorities are investigating a conversation on the messageboard 4chan posted Wednesday evening. The site is notorious for staging online hoaxes, in addition to cat memes, hackings and Internet attacks. But the conversation, if authentic, appears to show a gunman’s plans for a shooting. “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest,” the post reads.

Mercer grew up in California, where he attended the Switzer Learning Center for students with disabilities. Rick Rada, a former classmate, recalled Mercer as quiet, cheerful and non-violent.

“To me Chris was just an ordinary guy, really. He was one of the silent types like me,” Rada told The Washington Post. “… But we got along with our teachers. He opened up with the teachers, talked to them, had fun.”

Former neighbors in Torrance, Calif., a beachside city just south of Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times that Mercer liked to practice target shooting and tended to act “anxious or nervous,” as Rosario Espinoza put it. He and his mother, Laurel Harper, mostly kept to themselves, except for occasional disputes over bugs or loud noises. Espinoza’s mother, Rosario Lucumi, recalled thinking it “strange” that Harper referred to her son as “baby.”

[Umpqua, Ore.: Where unemployment is high and gun rights are precious]

Mercer moved to Oregon with his mother a year or two ago, according to public records. It’s not clear if and how he may have been affiliated with Umpqua Community College, though a student told CNN that she took a theater class with Mercer, and a “Chris Harper-Mercer” is listed as a production assistant on the Facebook page of a UCC fall show.

His father, Ian Mercer, still lives in Los Angeles. Harper stepped outside his home there briefly on Thursday night to say that he’d spent the day speaking with law enforcement and couldn’t answer questions about his son or the shooting.

“Shocked is all I can say,” he told reporters. “It’s been a devastating day.”

Gloria Buhring, a neighbor at the Winchester, Ore., apartment complex where Mercer appeared to have lived, said police officers swarmed the area Thursday, blocking much of the complex off with police tape.

Buhring didn’t know Mercer. But on Wednesday, she returned home to find a previously empty dumpster “overflowing with stuff that looked like it had been moved from an apartment,” she told The Washington Post. “It looked like somebody had gotten rid of a lot of stuff and left.”

Another Winchester neighbor, Bronte Hart, told Seattle TV station KIRO that Mercer would “sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light.”

Hart said a woman she believed to be Mercer’s mother lived with him and was “crying her eyes out” Thursday.

Steven Fisher, who also lives nearby, described Mercer as “skittish.”

“His demeanor, the way he moved, always looking around,” Fisher told CNN. “I got a bad vibe from him.”

Those words — “silent,” “skittish,” “strange” — come up a lot in answers to questions about Mercer. But not “violent.” No one interviewed who knew him said they suspected that he might be the type of person to fire into a classroom full of college students.

The attack started just after 10:30 a.m. local time, when students in Snyder Hall — a modest building in the southeast part of campus where science and English classes are held — heard a sudden popping noise.

Some were bewildered by the noises. But Cobb, a 17-year-old who heard the sound from her Writing 121 class in Snyder, recognized them immediately.

Gunshots.

“I grew up hunting, so by then I knew what it was,” she told The Washington Post. Cobb screamed to her teacher that they all needed to get out, and the instructor opened the door onto chaos: students running, a teacher crying, a man screaming for someone to call 911. Cobb left her phone, her backpack and all of her belongings in the classroom and then ran out of the building, tripping her way down the stairs.

“There was so much screaming you knew it was serious,” she said. “I was terrified. I was sprinting. You could hear the gunshots echoing in the hall.”

Cobb had just moved to Roseburg from Eugene a few months earlier, and she didn’t know anyone in her class.

“I think everyone in my room escaped,” she said. “But you know right away that wasn’t going to be the same next door.”

One of Cobb’s classmates, 19-year-old Hannah Miles, told the Eugene Register-Guard that she followed her instructor and several other classmates to the school bookstore, where an employee called 911.

The report came in at 10:38 a.m: “Active shooter at UCC,” the dispatcher said.

While police, paramedics and first responders went into action, Mercer continued his rampage on campus.

Anastasia Boylan, the witness being treated for a spinal injury, told her family that the gunman entered her classroom firing, according to CNN.

“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” he told the professor. Then he shot the man point blank.

According to Boylan’s account, as retold by her family, everyone in the classroom dropped to the ground. Mercer reloaded his weapon, then asked students who were Christian to stand up.

They did so. That’s when he told them “you’re going to see God,” and fired, choosing to shoot others in the legs.

Boylan, 18, survived by pretending to be dead. She’d been hit in the back and lay on the floor bleeding, according to CNN. When Mercer said, “Hey you, blonde woman,” she did nothing.

Eventually, Boylan was rescued and airlifted to a Eugene hospital, where she is being treated for her injuries, her grandmother told the LA Times.

In a room nearby, Cassandra Welding heard the percussive sounds of gunshots with horror. A classmate opened the door to look at what was happening, Welding told the LA Times, and was shot.

“We were screaming, ‘Close the door! Close the door!'” Welding said.

Someone dragged the injured woman back into the room and locked the door. Taking turns, classmates performed CPR on the woman, who had been shot in the torso. Her broken glasses lay on the floor near her, Welding told the LA Times. Blood was splattered on the walls.

The students crawled toward the back of the room, away from the door.

“I was so terrified for my life and I was shaking,” Welding said. While another classmate called 911, the 20-year-old phoned her mother. She wasn’t the only one.

“I just heard other people in tears, crying, calling their loved ones and telling them, ‘I love you.'” she told the Times. “It was such a heart-wrenching thing.”

Minutes after the initial 911 call, police arrived on campus.

Their quick, deadly confrontation with gunman was reported over the police scanner.

“We exchanged shots with him, he’s in a classroom on the east side of Snyder Hall,” an officer hurriedly informed the dispatcher.

Then, minutes later, “The suspect is down. We’ve got multiple gun shot wounds. We’re going to need multiple ambulances on scene,” an officer urged. “… As many ambulances as possible. We have upwards of 20 victims.”

Later in the day, that figure was revised down: 10 dead, including the gunman, and seven more wounded.

Hanlin, the Douglas County sheriff, said at a Thursday night press conference that the victims likely won’t be identified for another 24 to 48 hours. Officials want to ensure that all families have been notified before releasing the names of those killed.

Officials at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg said the hospital had received 10 patients from the shooting.

PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, a hospital about 70 miles north of the school, said it had three female patients, one in critical condition and the other two in serious condition.

The UCC campus will remain closed Friday, as officials continue to catalog and investigate the aftermath. Around Oregon, flags are being flown at half-staff.

“Today was the saddest day in the history of the college,” Cavin said at a news conference Thursday.

That evening, with their friends in the hospital, their campus a crime scene and the dead still nine nameless unknowns, hundreds of people gathered at a park in downtown Roseburg. Cheeks wet, candles clutched in their hands, mourners listened as professors, public officials and the college president urged them to think of the victims, and not the man who killed them.

When the speeches were over, a chant went up: “We are UCC.”

“After” was underway.
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ahoyle77 said:
Is there any confirmation of the shooting Christians thing? If theres anything the right wing loves more than Reagan, its Christian persecution story.
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I keep seeing it on CNN but reading one of the articles about it, I don't see any evidence that he singled out Christians in the sense that he shot only Christians.

It says he would ask people if they were Christians, and, if they said "yes", he'd say, "Good, because you're about to see God."

But there's no confirmation that he only shot them if they were Christians. It sounds to me like that was strictly about telling them they're about to see God, but he was shooting people regardless.
 
“I carry to protect myself — the exact same reason this happened,” Casey Runyan, a disabled Marine Corps veteran who now lives in the area, told the Associated Press. He told the AP he brings a Glock-29 pistol wherever he goes.
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I legit think that these people have fantasies about things like this going down and them whipping out their glock and firing off a few headshots and bringing things to a heroic end.
When there is just as much chance of that person being the first target and them the killer having another gun to use, or hero man in the heat of the moment firing off and hitting an innocent.

PlayALLtheGames said:
I keep seeing it on CNN but reading one of the articles about it, I don't see any evidence that he singled out Christians in the sense that he shot only Christians.

It says he would ask people if they were Christians, and, if they said "yes", he'd say, "Good, because you're about to see God."

But there's no confirmation that he only shot them if they were Christians. It sounds to me like that was strictly about telling them they're about to see God, but he was shooting people regardless.
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I was thinking the same.
Nothing shows to me that he only killed or singled out Christians, only that he made a comment about them meeting god.
 
MSN said:
One group that tracks gun violence, the Mass Shooting Tracker, said it was the 294th death or injury from a shooting involving four or more people in the United States this year — a rate of more than one victim a day.
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Wrong, it's the 294th mass shooting which involved four or more people getting killed or injured. Can someone tell MSN that?
 
Hex said:
I legit think that these people have fantasies about things like this going down and them whipping out their glock and firing off a few headshots and bringing things to a heroic end.
When there is just as much chance of that person being the first target and them the killer having another gun to use, or hero man in the heat of the moment firing off and hitting an innocent.



I was thinking the same.
Nothing shows to me that he only killed or singled out Christians, only that he made a comment about them meeting god.
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I agree that it's unclear, but asking about a person's religion as part of the process of killing people is an indication that *something* related to religion was potentially going through the killer's mind. So it's something worth investigating as part of understanding the complete context.

But you're right - without a witness or some other form of evidence showing that he treated non-christians differently, we don't know enough to say whether he targeted specific groups or not.
 
Hex said:
I legit think that these people have fantasies about things like this going down and them whipping out their glock and firing off a few headshots and bringing things to a heroic end.
When there is just as much chance of that person being the first target and them the killer having another gun to use, or hero man in the heat of the moment firing off and hitting an innocent.
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There was a least one guy carrying a concealed gun on the UCC campus and he had the good sense to keep it holstered:

John Parker Jr., a veteran and student at UCC, spoke with MSNBC and revealed that he was in a campus building with a concealed handgun when the shooting started. He suggested other students with him at the time were also carrying concealed handguns.

Parker’s interview revealed the practical difficulties of armed civilians trying to stop a mass shooting. By the time he became aware of the shooting, a SWAT team had already responded. He was concerned that police would view him as a “bad guy” and target him, so he quickly retreated into the classroom.
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/20...th-gun-was-on-ucc-campus-at-time-of-massacre/
 
Veritigo_X said:
They also kill deer and other animals. Saying that guns can only kill people isn't correct. They can kill a bunch of other stuff.
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Sure dude. Go deer hunting with this:

jacG15i.jpg


Now excuse me while I laugh at the mental image of a guy chasing a deer with a handgun.
 
Piggus said:
You can say the same thing about swords and bows. Yet their purpose for the overwhelming majority of people who own them, like guns, is for peaceful sporting/hobby, not murder.

The "a gun's only purpose is for killing people" argument is bullshit. Its purpose is what you make of it, not JUST what it was originally invented for (this doesn't just apply to guns.) Do you think that guns are supposed to be used for killing as opposed to cars? Because I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to use them that way unless it's part of your job or you have to defend your life.

A lot of guns (including some semi-automatic handgun models) are specifically designed for target shooting or hunting. How would you deal with those?
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animlboogy said:
I'd love to see the venn diagram of these two groups.
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Apathy said:
I read the article, and I gotta say it's flimsy at best.

Argument 3, he hedlines as "Cities and countries with strict gun laws have lower instances of shootings.", yet he never mentions any countries, only Chicago as his example. Funny how he wouldn't mention any country that has strict gun laws and only one city.

He goes on to say that On July 4th weekend of 2014 that Chicago had 82 shootings and says that "historically, chicago is a gun free city", but fails to mention that, according to wikipedia,

"Chicago formerly prohibited the sale of firearms within city limits, but on January 6, 2014, a federal judge ruled that this was unconstitutional.[47] The judge granted the city's request for six months to pass new laws regulating gun shops".

So that same year he is saying that Chicago had the deadliest July 4th weekend was the same year that it was made legal to sell guns inside the city limits again, funny how that was not in his little list.


2 and 5 are actually factual points.

his 4th point, that gun violence is lower than 20 years ago is true, hes not mentioning all violence is lower, there has been a large downward trend in violence in general. What he fails to mention is that mass shootings has increases. In this study by the FBI, from 2000-2013, (https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/20...r-incidents-in-the-u.s.-between-2000-and-2013) they show a clear upward trajectory for mass shootings (page 8) and while yes, the most common place for mass shootings to happen is a in a commerce space, guess where number 2 is. It's an education space (page 13). Here is some more breakdowns from a Harvard study (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-increasing-harvard-research).

It's a terribly written and argued "myths about gun violence" piece. I felt dumber by reading it.
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continued this discussion in the other thread
 
BobbyRoberts said:
Well, Mother Jones is back with more information about Douglas County Sherriff John Hanlin. Yesterday they posted the correspondence he sent to Vice President Biden in 2013 that very stridently/angrily argued against gun control reforms.

Today they found the facebook post where he shared a Sandy Hook truther video with the suggestion you watch "and keep an open mind."
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Well, that's horrible, but are they alleging some causal connection to yesterday's shooting? i.e. the Sheriff's kooky opinions directly caused more people to die? If not, where's the relevance, other than some thin, tangential implicit guilt argument, i.e. 'blood on his hands' for opposing more gun control laws? What gun laws would have to be passed to have prevented yesterday's shooting, and how likely is it that any of them could actually become law? I just don't understand where attacking the sheriff there has anything to do with this story, other than just taking advantage of the shooting as an opportunity/excuse to do so. I'm on the other side of the country so the dude means nothing to me, but I don't understand singling him out for responsibility.
 
Bodacious said:
Well, that's horrible, but are they alleging some causal connection to yesterday's shooting? i.e. the Sheriff's kooky opinions directly caused more people to die? If not, where's the relevance, other than some thin, tangential implicit guilt argument, i.e. 'blood on his hands' for opposing more gun control laws? What gun laws would have to be passed to have prevented yesterday's shooting, and how likely is it that any of them could actually become law? I just don't understand where attacking the sheriff there has anything to do with this story, other than just taking advantage of the shooting as an opportunity/excuse to do so. I'm on the other side of the country so the dude means nothing to me, but I don't understand singling him out for responsibility.
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If you don't understand why a Sheriff in charge of policing a county posting a Sandy Hook truther video is insane, compromises his ability to be in charge of the investigation, and indirectly implicates him in continuing delusions by gun-totin' lunatics ...
 
My drinking buddy was wearing a pin that said "Guns save lives", when she ask me my opinion, I just said, "I have never seen a gun save a life, just take them".

Yesterday, that opinion was vindicated.

And to make things worse, most of the guns taking lives in my country are sent from this country, probably after they where used to take someone out. Is just sick.
 
PantherLotus said:
If you don't understand why a Sheriff in charge of policing a county posting a Sandy Hook truther video is insane, compromises his ability to be in charge of the investigation, and indirectly implicates him in continuing delusions by gun-totin' lunatics ...
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Yeah that's the thin, tangential implicit guilt thing I was talking about. Nothing about the actual performance of his duties, just disagreeable thoughts. (And I disagree with them too, but I don't live there and don't have a vote in that county.) If he had somehow fucked up the response to the shooting, and his views or policies had a role in the fuckup, I'd understand the character assassination. This is just finding a new boogeyman. I'll stick to blaming the guy who murdered a bunch of people.
 
Took a listen to some of the Right Wing nut radio shows today, and they are all in on the "gun free zone" narrative despite the fact that the school wasn't a gun free zone.
 
Bodacious said:
Yeah that's the thin, tangential implicit guilt thing I was talking about. Nothing about the actual performance of his duties, just disagreeable thoughts. (And I disagree with them too, but I don't live there and don't have a vote in that county.) If he had somehow fucked up the response to the shooting, and his views or policies had a role in the fuckup, I'd understand the character assassination. This is just finding a new boogeyman. I'll stick to blaming the guy who murdered a bunch of people.
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I think it will absolutely impact how he handles this investigation. How could it not? How could the way he prioritizes various aspects and interprets evidence not be colored by an inclination to consider that a mass shooting might be a "false flag operation"?
 
Bodacious said:
Well, that's horrible, but are they alleging some causal connection to yesterday's shooting? i.e. the Sheriff's kooky opinions directly caused more people to die? If not, where's the relevance, other than some thin, tangential implicit guilt argument, i.e. 'blood on his hands' for opposing more gun control laws?
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Why would you ask "what the relevance" is?

He's a law enforcement official who shared a video that suggests a shooting at a kindergarten might have been a hoax perpetrated as a means to enact stricter gun laws.

How is that not relevant to the larger discussion?

I'm also unsure that holding said opinion should be minimized as an act of "kookiness." It's not "kooky" that the main law enforcement official in charge of handling this tragedy basically threatened the Vice President in a letter and then shared a Truther video on his facebook. That's disturbing. Not kooky.

It's an example of how destructive this particular corner of American Gun Culture can be even when members of said culture have chosen to put themselves in harms way to protect normal citizens. It's an example of how even the good guys in this scenario are contributing to an atmosphere that makes these sorts of tragedies not just possible, but probable.

And if he's willing to entertain the notion that left-wingers could stage the fake-killing of kindergarten kids to advance their political agenda, what does that say about his abilities as a detective?

Pointing this out isn't "finding a new boogeyman." You can call attention to this sorta bullshit without having it REPLACE the main topic entirely. Nobody's suggesting that he's suddenly more responsible for what happened than the shooter. That's ridiculous.
 
I guess it couldn't have been avoided but I wish the media would have followed their example and not blasted the shooter's name everywhere.

Even fucking NPR ran a story about how the school officials and families and loved ones wanted it to be about the victims and not the shooter, then proceeded to talk about him by name.
 
DrForester said:
Took a listen to some of the Right Wing nut radio shows today, and they are all in on the "gun free zone" narrative despite the fact that the school wasn't a gun free zone.
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I read that it was gun free, either way, if it were a gun free campus that would have stopped this from happening?
 
The Technomancer said:
I think it will absolutely impact how he handles this investigation. How could it not? How could the way he prioritizes various aspects and interprets evidence not be colored by an inclination to consider that a mass shooting might be a "false flag operation"?
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Then he'll fuck his own career, cuz it's not like the feds aren't in there too.
 
Pai Pai Master said:
I guess it couldn't have been avoided but I wish the media would have followed their example and not blasted the shooter's name everywhere.

Even fucking NPR ran a story about how the school officials and families and loved ones wanted it to be about the victims and not the shooter, then proceeded to talk about him by name.
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Exactly, this is what will inspire future gunmen, they've laid the groundwork right there, but I guess it's good for ratings and creating a culture of paranoia.
 
marrec said:
I wish people would stop saying guns are for sport and instead say, "I use them like toys cause they're fun, like a football that I can kill myself with later" maybe not that verbose.
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Ok, I'll bite.

I like guns because they are fun to pull out of the closet every once in a while to go target shooting with.

Also, for my family, guns are a necessity because we have a massive hog problem on my father's land here in Texas. My dad is a crop scientist with small fields, not giant ones that could be written off, that are easily destroyed by the infestation of 300 lbs walking bulldozers.

We attempt to catch them in traps but that only nets one or two at a time. Actively hunting them with multiple semi-auto .308 SCARs we can quickly take down a dozen in one night without them running away and dying a slow painful death.
 
Pai Pai Master said:
I guess it couldn't have been avoided but I wish the media would have followed their example and not blasted the shooter's name everywhere.

Even fucking NPR ran a story about how the school officials and families and loved ones wanted it to be about the victims and not the shooter, then proceeded to talk about him by name.
Click to expand...

I can sympathize with what is going on here with NPR.

Making the choice not to mention him violates their journalistic mission to uphold a position of neutrality and objectivity while mentioning him may increase the risk of copy cat killers gaining motivation through the fame and discussion these killers receive.

Its a tough balance of truth, transparency, ethics and morality.

Frankly I have a strong hunch On The Media on NPR will probably tackle this issue this week.
 
BobbyRoberts said:
The viability of his employment and possible career choices afterwards aren't really the point, though.

Nobody cares whether he's going to fuck his career.
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What is it you think should be done? What influence that could matter do you think he could have on things? The ATF is involved in the investigation - probably running it. But I'll agree with you that he shouldn't be holding that office, so I take back what I said earlier ... nothing wrong with bringing this to light. I expect the voters there have already heard about it though (and still elected him).
 
Jonm1010 said:
I can sympathize with what is going on here with NPR.

Making the choice not to mention him violates their journalistic mission to uphold a position of neutrality and objectivity while mentioning him may increase the risk of copy cat killers gaining motivation through the fame and discussion these killers receive.

Its a tough balance of truth, transparency, ethics and morality.

Frankly I have a strong hunch On The Media on NPR will probably tackle this issue this week.
Click to expand...


Agreed 100%.

I have a ton of respect for NPR and I absolutely can sympathize with their point of view.
 
Jonm1010 said:
I can sympathize with what is going on here with NPR.

Making the choice not to mention him violates their journalistic mission to uphold a position of neutrality and objectivity while mentioning him may increase the risk of copy cat killers gaining motivation through the fame and discussion these killers receive.

Its a tough balance of truth, transparency, ethics and morality.

Frankly I have a strong hunch On The Media on NPR will probably tackle this issue this week.
Click to expand...

A big part of the story is why this guy chose to do this, anyone who refuses to report on that is doing the public a disservice. They're basically stuck between a rock, journalistic ethics, and a hard place, human morality.
 
DrForester said:
Took a listen to some of the Right Wing nut radio shows today, and they are all in on the "gun free zone" narrative despite the fact that the school wasn't a gun free zone.
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Michael Savage implied yesterday that the shooting either didn't happen or was allowed to happen by the government.

I hate listen to him on the way home from work for the lulz.
 
Hex said:
I legit think that these people have fantasies about things like this going down and them whipping out their glock and firing off a few headshots and bringing things to a heroic end.
When there is just as much chance of that person being the first target and them the killer having another gun to use, or hero man in the heat of the moment firing off and hitting an innocent.
Click to expand...

I had a teacher in community college like that. He was normal enough most of the time, but the few tines he talked about owning a gun you could tell it wasn't just about self defense. He'd talk about how castle docotrine would basically let him kill a burgular if he ever had one. Once or twice he even described a scenario where he would find a guy trying to break into his house, come up behind him and put the gun to his head, saying ' you know I could kill you right now?". Even if that's not exactly how the castle law works. He was clearly pretty excited by it.

This was Texas certainly, but a fairly sell off suburb of Dallas and he was in the tech field, so it surprised me a bit.
 
BobbyRoberts said:
Well, Mother Jones is back with more information about Douglas County Sherriff John Hanlin. Yesterday they posted the correspondence he sent to Vice President Biden in 2013 that very stridently/angrily argued against gun control reforms.

Today they found the facebook post where he shared a Sandy Hook truther video with the suggestion you watch "and keep an open mind."
Click to expand...

So the sad thing here is that this link will guarantee the Sandy Hook truthers this guy was part of will again paint this as a "false flag" and will be further convinced of their immense bullshit. May even go after the family of victims of this attack...again.
 
PlayALLtheGames said:
I keep seeing it on CNN but reading one of the articles about it, I don't see any evidence that he singled out Christians in the sense that he shot only Christians.

It says he would ask people if they were Christians, and, if they said "yes", he'd say, "Good, because you're about to see God."

But there's no confirmation that he only shot them if they were Christians. It sounds to me like that was strictly about telling them they're about to see God, but he was shooting people regardless.
Click to expand...

If they said that they were, he'd shoot them in the head. Otherwise, in the leg, etc.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/or...munity-college-gunman-talked-religion-n437051
 
Nils said:
Not sure how reliable a single quote like this would be in a very panicky situation. Could have just been his aim was a bit all over the place. Could have been a spur of the moment sick little game for him. Who knows...
Click to expand...

It was corroborated by several eyewitnesses at the scene.
 
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